Neil Young slams Google, after you log in to read his rant with Google or Facebook Musician Neil Young has spent years railing against the poor quality of digital audio. And now he's taken aim at Google, Facebook and Amazon for having "figured out a way to use all the great music of everyone from all time, without reporting an artist's number of plays or paying a f*cking cent to the musicians." "Aren't they …
I really hope the intention of the article was to argue that musician Neil Young is happy rail against Google and Facebook but lacks the courage of his convictions to ban their logins as he would lose views.
Most probably he has nothing to do with the site's construction and it's a feature of the template used by whoever he paid to build it.
He is allowed to be against things and not have the best grasp of tech and self promotion online/PR stuff.
It's not like 'owd Neil sat there typing it out onto whatever platform they use.
I'll have been emailed to someone who works for him with instructions regarding which platforms to put it out on.
I don't think he'll have been heavily (at all) involved with the delivery of said content, the design of his website or "his" use of social media.
"He is allowed to be against things and not have the best grasp of tech and self promotion online/PR stuff."
No, no he is NOT. You cant rail against facebook and google and have an OAUTH sign in and data slurp. You cant rail against mega-corp while being hosted on a mega-corp website. He is rich enough not to be an idiot. He is rich enough not to be excused.
I'm embarrased to say I only recently found out what one of my favourite tunes is all about, when I took the time to actually listen to the lyrics of Sweet Home Alabama.
Hey, at least Neil Young had been in a band with Rick James at one time.
Not fair. You cannot blame a medical treatment for being contrary to a person's views.
I'm generally against GMOs as well (on the basis that I'm not convinced we really know the long-term consequences of what we're doing), but I am dead against dying. I will thus eat GMO food as happily as any other food (not that we have much of a choice these days anyway).
It may possibly, barely be true that we need GMOs to feed the world and to drench formerly rich and diverse biomes with Glyphosate and consequently shovel billions to Monsanto forever for the privilege .
Can ANYBODY quote a genuine non-paid-for-by-Monsanto scientific study by disinterested agricultural experts that supports this much-repeated propaganda assertion? Or have they all been silenced?
GMO studies...you could start here:
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-gmo-controversy/
https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/questions-on-gmos/
https://www.skepticink.com/smilodonsretreat/2012/10/24/a-survey-of-long-term-gm-food-studies/
"know the long-term consequences"
We have been genetically modifying plants and livestock for centuries.
Maybe we should go back to zapping plants with radiation to produce random mutations and throwing them all at the wall to see what sticks because it is just giving nature a helping hand?
Pascal,
We have all been eating hybridized food for hundreds of 100s of years and we all die in the end. If you think about it, if GMO food is a concern then so are all pharmaceuticals, alcohol, sugar in excess, water and any other thing you ingest. If you worry about the consequences of all these things then doesn't life get more difficult then it should? I am not saying you shouldn't pay attention to what you eat but worrying about GMO food is mostly a problem for people without real problems.
Obligatory Neil Young parody.
FF to the 22:15 mark for the song "Southern California Brings Me Down."
Musicians being ripped off by tech companies instead of record companies, agents, managers, promoters etc etc**
Now I can sleep more easily.
**Bandmates, fellow musicians, TV companies, restaurants, shopping malls, discos, ...oh....the Russians! Don't forget to blame the Russians!
Encouraging to know that you think it is alright for musicians to be ripped off by everybody.
I'm so glad you can sleep easily, but I'm still trying to figure out:
How do you sleep at night?
Oh, yeah. You're a Trumpee. One of those so-called conservatives who used to hate Russia, until they helped your new God be elected, and who are now your good buddies.
You guys will sleep through anything, even the extinction of the race.
I'm sure he has spoken out endlessly about how the money from royalties should be split fairly to the whole band and not have the bulk given to the songwriter. I'm sure he has also waxed lyrically about how session musicians responsible in the background for so many hits deserve royalties and has personally paid royalties out of his own pocket to any on his music. While he sites in his massive mansion crying over the number of zeros on his latest royalty cheque.
"Most people get paid once to do a day's work, they don't expect to get paid for that day's work over and over for 70 fsking years."
You make it sound like it's a terrible thing and Neil's fault that he created music that people still love and that he and others can still sell and make money from 50 years (not 70) later. Why should anyone else benefit from the fruits of his labour more than he himself? You are way off-base. You are quite correct though when you say that you don't know.
"Why should anyone else benefit from the fruits of his labour more than he himself? "
Why shouldn't everyone benefit from the fruits of his labour for free and fuck him?
Seems like a greater good to me, however, when you can answer that question dumb ass you will understand the reason for copyright and how badly it is being abused.
JSIM,
It looks like copy write extends for over 100 years now, this has not always been the case though and for some reason patents are only good for 20 years. I agree that this is not Neil Youngs fault but it does beg the question whether a song should be copy written for 100 years seeing it wasn't always so. I suspect this is another law that was put in place by someone in the industry as opposed to a popular consensus.
"Young's beef appears to be that Google indexes pirate sites and lists them in its search results, all while coining it from ads."
Did you even read his rant? He's talking about YOUTUBE, all 100% legal through the DMCA intermediary loophole, but I know piracy when I see it.
Honest pirates still face draconian punishment, yet somehow it's become a legitimate business model in Silicon Valley? DRAIN THE SWAMP!
What part of that did you not understand, Digital Millennium Copyright Act, intermediary, loophole? Google owns Youtube, which plays people's music without paying royalties. Bands lose a fortune, because they'll come out with a new record, and people will just download it from Youtube instead of buying it. Then they'll have to play live for months just to pay back the studio recording time.
YES. This one data vampire alone has almost every site CAPTCHA'd. Behind Google are a flock of other ravening bloodsuckers. Tonight, I found that one of my (admittedly crappy) ISPNs allowed access w/out even a user name (-don't bother, I know what to check). To contact the vendor about the prob one has to use a CAPTCHA (Google), after providing particulars re the account on a site that has 38 TRACKERS. Christmas eve, I was in the central subway station in my city. Every pillar, every poster on every wall was covered w/a Google poster. "They have landed" was all I could think, in dull panic.
When are people going to snap out of it and start boycotting these monster lampreys? What "free" or cheap entertainment or convenience they throw us, it's only to vacuum up our most valuable assets - our PI- on the cheap. You guys should support NY & anyone else w/reach for standing up & saying anything against one of these ghouls. How many celebs, who could make an instant impact by speaking out, have said word one about any of this? Instead, you're picking the skin off him 'cos he's old, or he's not a tech expert, or he makes more money than you.
Nothing on the site requires the use of Facebook or Google, nor is anybody required to use them to log in. Telling people that he's not responsible for information that they give to Google is warning people, not promoting Google. It's doing the opposite of what you are saying.
Even if people do use Google, that doesn't mean he has to agree with their policies on music. I don't agree with George Washington on slavery, but that doesn't mean that I'm against democracy because of it. Stop conflating issues.
I'd like to see him take an ABX test between whatever snake oil audio format he's selling this year and whatever the new hotness in MPEG audio compression is, both encoded from the same master. To give him a fighting chance, we can even use 128 kb/s for the MPEG audio.
With his elderly musician's ears, I'm betting he couldn't tell the difference.
Wbich, Neal, you once were:
“Go back to the pre-recorded era. If you wanted to hear Caruso, you went to go see Caruso and it’s coming back to that. The t-shirt and the album are peripherals of the actual performance. Everything revolves around the gig,”
That's Richard Thompson. Once upon a time, Neal, you were a guitar god. And you toured, and people went to see you, and got something honest out of the transaction.
Now you expect to live off your back catalog and sling audiophool hokum like the Pono.
Shut up and play your goddamn guitar. If you're good and you're determined you can make a living at it. Superstardom is an accident of the mid 20th century, not a star placed in the Firmament by Jehovah around which the universe must revolve.
Me, I'm a listener - but I buy concert tickets every year.
This post has been deleted by its author
He clearly doesn't understand much about technology. In addition to the login options he appears to think that google spiders sites with a bunch of trained monkeys who cackle gleefully when they find a piracy site they can profit from.
If only those pesky piracy sites all agreed to a standard whereby they all changed their title tags to "piracy site here" it would make them much easier to filter out.
In truth they generally don't host any files on the same servers as the site itself and the file names are not usually indicative either.. it would be hard to reliably catch any of them with an algorithm especially without also blocking lyrics and fan sites too.
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